Sermon Preached by the Rev. A. N. Rowland on August 6
"The blasphemy of the Spwit shall not 13: 31. Read Mark 3: 13-25 and The unpardonable sin is a popular religious phrase and as usual is inaccurate. But it serves a purpose. It is a phrase that reverberates in conscience and in memory. It brings an ill-defined sense of terror, or at any rate aw uneasy feeling of anxiety, which keeps open many a mind that would otherwise be closed to the thought of human destiny. hangs about like a superstition when religion is no longer served by intelligence. And although it has an exaggerated importance by being detached from its context, it does preserve in the popular vocabulary two words sin and pardon that have a great work for our hearts.
So the phrase has a kind of wandering commission to waylay conscience and make men pause and inquire. It is like a thunderclap, it tells of mighty powers and disturbances somewhere, and it makes you look to the roofing of your own house.
This thunderclap is the collision of two words.
First there is the word Sin which signifies that as a matter of foolish fact we take the field against God. Second, there is the word Pardon. which signifies that God as certainly takes up arms against our sin in the name of grace with the forces of love and by opposing ends it. The '"unpardonable sin" is described in Mark as eternal, and means that there is a kind of sin or rather a climax of sin that gets a fixed and permanent hold which love itself cannot shake or loosen.
In all this play of ideas the really tremendous truth is that sin (as a rule) can be pardoned and forgiven. What to understand by that? thing that darkens and depraves the secret of life be obliterated? Let us rather say its influence can be submerged by © influences greater still.
You have seen the vile smoke from out of the mill chimneys from Pootung to Jessfield along the northern border of our city. What becomes of it? It is there, yet it is not there. Look on your window curtains, your mosquito netting, your washing bill, and you will know the smoke was not; a fancy. But for all that its effects as smoke are dissipated in the blessed air about us. They cease to defile the landscape and blot out the face of heaven.
The Bible uses that illustration of God's. forgiveness. You fie, you steal, you take up a tale against your neighbour, you break out in passion or in temper. be Matt. 12:
1-37. forgiven.' Matt.
You pour out from that furnace of egoism within you, like smoke from a chimney, proud thoughts of yourself, scornful, angry judgments of your fellows, discontented, rebellious, graceless feelings towards God. You feel how defiling it is, how degrading. And in the very sense of shame and distress, that motion towards repentance, the love of God deals with it, dissipates it in the great fact of pardon. "I have blotted out as a cloud the transgressions and like a thick cloud thy sins." They no longer govern the situation, colour your outlook' or dictate your destiny. It means there are bigger thing afoot than the aggression of our sins,—spiritual forces that do not emanate from us at all but from the heart of God and were made evident once for all in Jesus Christ.
People who don't believe in God have to believe that the mightiest things that move in this universe proceed for the confused heart of a man. But do you really believe that? If there is such a thing as an output of thought ~which has some good in it, may we not be sure there is an output of thought in such a universe as this that is all-good? Where sin abounded grace did much more abound" Deep calleth unto deep. Man's depth would be despair but for God's deeper depth." Thus we can recognize in the discomfort that follows on our sin a contact between it and what proceeds from God. It is the thunderclap, that promises a clearance of the air and the sky. On the authority of Christ this is the chief faes we have to take account of in human life—the revolutionary thought, which if it were universally accepted would bring about a new heaven and a new earth, I suggest to you the word pardon has been considered too narrowly and legally—as if it were an affair of the Law court. Judge Peter Grain has just said that in his court, in matters of tenure and transfer he has nothing to do with Shanghai custom and- the law has nothing to do with it. We may venture the ology that God's dealing with us is quite independent of the processes we are accustomed to.
In a court of law pardon is the last word. But in the spirit tual world it is the first word: 1t inaugurates an understanding and cooperation with God which may lead to the greatest possible results. And in this connexion let me remove another misconception by pointing out that Jesus does }not relate Pardon to the subject sot Hell. That is the popular background but it does not appear in the teaching of Christ, in the parable e.g. of the Prodigal Son. Jesus presents pardon as the opening of intercourse, the entrance on a life of fellowship, the transformation of our attitude towards God and -our fellows, like a treaty formed as the basis of increasing commerce. There is a third misconception of pardon I would like to remove by saying that it is not a gift for private enjoyment, but the key to a change of social life—a commission to operate it. You have beea, let us say, suspicious, churlish, snobbish, envious, inimical. But a sense of divine pardon, real contract' with God's forgiveness, changes all that: you catch the same spirit and grow magnanimous. You no longer pass on or press home any evil thing. You give up that vendetta, it is so discordant with the music in your heart.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.